worked frantically in the face of renewed NRA fire to move the blazing wrecks out of the way, and the medics dragged away the casualties from around the cave mouth. The NRA fire never slackened, and soon Hammer marines were in place returning the compliment as fresh armor-a light tank this time, an Akkad, judging from its low-profile main turret-moved into place, its gun adding to the appalling racket that had the walls of Juliet-24 shaking.
'Dickheads,' Tek said dismissively. 'That Akkad is wasting its time.'
'Only if Mokhine's pulled his people back,' Michael muttered.
'He will have.'
'Stalemate,' Anna whispered. 'An Akkad's too damn fat to fit down that tunnel of theirs. I think they're just there to make sure we don't break through. The Hammers aren't going anywhere for a while.'
Anna was dead right. The Hammers had been thrown back on the defensive, their attack had stalled, and the frustration showed in the body language of marine NCOs and officers. This was not the way they expected things to turn out, that much was obvious.
Across the valley floor outside the portal, more heavy ordnance waited: Anvil cannon-armed urban attack vehicles with a scattering of Akkad light tanks and drone launchers. Beyond them, Michael could see yet more marines and more armor, a lot more. How the NRA was ever going to defeat them he could not even begin to imagine. He flicked a glance at Anna; she stared unmoving at the holovids. Michael wondered what she was thinking.
'Shit,' Tek murmured. 'That's a lot of Hammers. Just what we want. Okay, I've seen enough.' She slid back and turned to her comms man, a lance corporal responsible for laying the single stand of plasfiber-armored optical fiber that connected her platoon to the outside world. 'Comms,' she whispered.
Without a word, the trooper passed Tek the connector. Try as he might, Michael could not hear what she was muttering into her whisper mike. Whatever the reply, Tek seemed happy with it. She passed the connector back and waved Michael and Anna in close.
'Much as I'd like to kick those assholes back where they came from, we don't have what it takes. So here's the plan. You'-she tapped Michael on the arm-'stay here with Lance Corporal Chengkiz. Your job is to keep an eye on our Hammer friends, and for Kraa's sake, make sure they don't hear you.'
'Roger that.'
Tek turned to Anna. 'Sergeant, you're going to lead the rest of us back the way we came, but only as far as that access tunnel. Brigade is sending up combat engineers with fuel-air guns'-barbecues, Michael reminded himself; that was what the NRA called them-'and it'll be up to us to clear as much of this damn rock as we can so we can get the guns up easily.'
'And this rockfall while you're at it,' Michael said. 'Otherwise the charges won't work so well.'
'You're right,' Tek said. 'I'll ask the colonel to send up a second platoon. Anyway, once the barbecues are in position, ENCOMM will fire them. All being well, they should clean out the portal.'
'What about the marines outside, in the valley?' Anna asked.
'Thank Kraa for caves and sinkholes. We're infiltrating barbecues into position below the cliff top overlooking the valley. They'll drop a pattern onto the portal approaches. Should make our lives a bit easier.'
'Shit. Those Hammers aren't going to know what hit them.'
'No, they're not. Anyway, once the barbecues have thinned the Hammers out a bit, ENCOMM will send in 5 and 12 Brigades to take out what's left. It seems this is one of their main lines of attack. They look committed, so ENCOMM wants to persuade them they are wasting their time. We'll wait in the access tunnel and then go once the charges are fired.'
Michael could not help himself. 'There are thousands of Hammers out there. How's ENCOMM going to get the 5th and 12th out there?'
Tek shook her head. 'You Feds,' she said softly. 'Questions, questions, always questions. Let's just say we have tunnels accessing the valley that the Hammers don't know about, sally ports we call them. Nice old-fashioned touch, I've always thought. There'll be NRA troopers appearing out of the rock in the thousands, coming from nowhere far as the Hammers are concerned. Not that there'll be many left to see them coming.'
'Let me guess,' Michael said. 'More barbecues?'
'Oh, yeah. Every last one we can lay our hands on.'
'What about the Hammer's tunnel?'
Tek grinned, teeth flaring white in the backlight from the holovids. 'What about the-'
A bone-jarring crunch cut her short, then another. Michael flinched as broken rock rained down from the tunnel roof. 'Ah,' he said when it stopped. 'Is that my answer?'
'Sure is. No Hammers will be using that tunnel for a while, and it'll be a while before they bring their hard-rock laser cutters back into play. We've blown the tunnel leading back to the front line as well. It'll be a bloody business mopping up the Hammers, and there are plenty of them, but it's just a matter of time. They've got nowhere to run, and they don't seem to enjoy our tunnels. Wonder why. Right, Sergeant. Move out.'
'Watch yourself, Michael,' Anna said. Without another word, she turned and left.
Tek patted Michael's arm. 'Good luck,' she said before following Anna's dusty shape into the darkness.
Michael leaned across to Chengkiz. 'Lieutenant Michael Helfort, Corp,' he said.
'Good to meet you, sir. Heard a lot about you.'
'All lies, Corp, all lies. Now, we don't need two pairs of eyes, so how about I take the first half hour, then you take over?'
'Sounds good to me.'
Time dragged; Michael had drifted off into a doze when a soft scraping brought him back to life. 'Visitors,' he whispered to Chengkiz, setting his rifle to his shoulder. Unlikely to be Hammers, that much he knew, but it did not pay to take chances.
The familiar shape of a Fed combat helmet emerged out of the gloom; it was all the identification he needed. 'Anna,' he hissed. 'How's it going?'
'Fine,' she murmured back as she slid into position alongside him. 'The barbecues are on their way. It's going to be a bitch to get them through, but somehow I don't think that's going to bother Colonel Mokhine. Never met anyone like him. No such thing as a problem. All he sees are situations and solutions. Amazing.'
'So what happens now?'
'Mokhine wants you to pull back to the cross-tunnel once the engineers turn up. You'll find C Company there. Report to them for orders.'
'Okay. Shit, hope this works. There have to be ten thousand Hammers waiting out there.'
'At least. The last briefing said the Hammers were going to throw at least one hundred thousand marines into the attack.' She shook her head. 'Hell, maybe there's even twenty thousand out there. Who knows… who cares? See you later.'
Leaving the combat engineers to finish up, Michael made his way back down the tunnel past squads of troopers carrying boulders to tamp explosives in place, a pattern of small charges to clear the tunnel mouth of the remaining debris; a millisecond later the barbecues would fire. When Michael had first seen a fuel-air gun-the NRA called the crude assembly of plasteel pipes barbecues because they were perfect for flash-grilling Hammers-it took an effort not to laugh. They looked exactly like what they were: crude and homebuilt, the work of some crackpot inventor.
Crude or not, they worked. Spurred on by a desperate shortage of ordnance, NRA ingenuity made sure of that; Michael had seen the holovid. The damage just one could do was enormous, and Juliet-24 was going to be on the receiving end of six. Each barbecue lobbed a pattern of bomblets into the air, the bomblets' aluminum-boosted fuel command-fired by a flash laser to create an enormous fireball. What the fireball did not kill, massive overpressure and the subsequent vacuum would; that was why they were so devastating in tunnels and caves and why Branxton Base had so many blast doors in its connecting tunnels.
Michael could only hope that they worked, that they took out all the marines in the portal. ENCOMM's planned counterattack would throw two brigades at the Hammers. At best that meant eight thousand troopers, and that was being optimistic given the casualties the NRA must have suffered so far. It would have to be the best ground assault ever planned to have any chance of hurting the Hammers, never mind persuading them to pack up and bugger off home.
Getting Tek's troopers back to the cross-tunnel was not the nightmare Michael had braced himself for, and in a
